USA: New film '3 Needles' offering a look at the AIDS epidemic from across the globe debuts on 'World AIDS Day'

A new film exploring the AIDS pandemic and its varying effect across the globe debuted as part of World Aids Day on December 1st. '3 Needles' tells the story of individuals from different cultures facing the deadly disease on separate continents through highlighting the similarities each of them face in the daily struggle to survive. Most importantly, it brings to light the issue of the stigma surrounding those afflicted, and goes to great lengths to show that it is a disease that doesn't discriminate based on skin color, religious and cultural background, or economic class. "I think we have always had a limited idea here in North America of what AIDS is and who is most affected by it. Of course I learned through making the film that the face of AIDS entirely depends on who is doing the looking, because it is your culture and your history and faith and language that takes something that's invisible, a virus, and give it a form, give it a face," said '3 Needles' director Thom Fitzgerald. The film is divided into three parts, with each section named for different religions -- the Buddhists, the Christians, and the Pagans -- and is set in China, Canada, and South Africa, respectively. In China, the story focuses on a pregnant woman (Lucy Liu) who travels the countryside with a mobile blood collection service, which pays destitute villagers to give their blood. At first the villagers rejoice in the new-found source of income, but when each of them begin to fall ill with flu-like symptoms, Liu's character flees, not knowing what is causing the vast sickness, but sensing that she is responsible. When her husband also becomes sick, she visits a doctor with what little money she has, and learns that she too has the disease and may pass it on to the baby she is carrying. All the while, she has no idea that she has become one of 38 million people across the globe living with AIDS. "Even with people not understanding each other, there's something that people understand that is not exactly right, even if they live in a very distant place, like China is a very big country, and there's some parts of the country that don't know what's going on, they're not fully educated on AIDS and HIV or they don't know about what's going on in other parts of China even, let alone even other parts of the world. So that distance still connects us with this plague and this disease, which is the disease and the plague of our century," said Lucy Liu, star of '3 Needles.' Thousands of miles away in South Africa, a missionary (Chloe Sevigny) is urging dying Africans from Wild Coast tribes to accept Jesus before it's too late, but she strays from her mission and struggles to raise a family of orphaned children who have lost their parents to AIDS. She bargains with a local Afrikaans plantation owner for more funding for the mission, but goes against her vows to God in order to help them. Meanwhile, in Canada, a B-level porn star (Shawn Ashmore) is cheating on his monthly HIV test results by stealing his dying father's blood, knowingly risking the lives of the people he works with. His mother (Stockard Channing) hatches a fraud scheme to pull the family out of poverty, but risks her own life as well in an effort to help her son. "Economical circumstances sort of affect all these stories and all these characters, and a lot of the problems and a lot of the solutions have to do with some money, and that's the sad truth, but that's how, you need medicine, you need education, you need money for all those things. And that sort of really, I wouldn't say drives the characters, but it becomes a huge issue in all the stories, I think, it's very prevalent. It's just money, and that's a sad thing," said actor Shawn Ashmore. '3 Needles' debuted at the 2005 Toronto Film Festival and has screened at several festivals since then, but held off a wide release until World AIDS Day of this year, in an effort to bring to the forefront the issue which has seemed to fall from the public consciousness in recent years. Although the western world has seen a decrease in AIDS-related deaths, the number of HIV infections is still on the rise, especially among minorities. More alarming are infection rates in third world countries where there is little or no awareness of the disease and the ease at which it spreads. "In Europe and in North America now it's very rare that somebody will die from AIDS and HIV because we have the cocktail, we have all of these other medicines and prescriptions and pharmaceutical breakdowns of what we need to do, as well as a huge awareness of 'have safe sex' and all those things, and in other parts of the world they don't know, children are boiling needles or just re-wrapping needles because they want to make money -- their first instinct is survival," said Liu. '3 Needles' also stars Olympia Dukakis and Sandra Oh, and opens on December 1st. A special screening for the film was held at the United Nations on November 29th.

ITN Source | December 7, 2006

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